Why technologists need the #4opens

We have more than enough code, what we need is technology that helps people build power together. If you work in free software, #FOSS, decentralized networks or the #Fediverse, you probably already understand some of the problems with corporate #dotcons platforms. You may be building alternatives because you want technology to be more open, more democratic and less controlled by a handful of corporations.

That is a good place to start, but there is a recurring problem in grassroots technology – we keep trying to solve social and political problems by building more technology. A new protocol, another platform, a different database or a cleverer technical architecture is offered as the answer. Yet the same old problems keep returning, concentrated power, passive users, gate keeping, status games and communities that struggle to organize themselves.

This repeated outcome is what we call the #geekproblem, the habit of treating human problems as if they were primarily technical ones. The way past this is not a blinded luddite reaction to abandon technology, it is to connect our technical skills to the social realities they are supposed to serve, that is where the #4opens as social technological path comes in.

Open source, #FOSS is by it self necessary, but it is not enough. Open-source code matters, open protocols matter, without them, communities have little chance of building infrastructure they can inspect, adapt and maintain themselves. But open code does not automatically produce an open community. A project can publish its source code while keeping its data inaccessible. It can implement an open protocol while making participation difficult. It can claim to be decentralized while leaving all the meaningful decisions in the hands of a few developers or administrators.

Think about a project that runs on an open-source codebase. Can its users access and move their data? Can other projects connect to it using shared standards? Can the community understand how decisions are made, challenge them and take part in shaping the project’s direction? If the answer is no, then the project may be open in a narrow technical sense while remaining closed in practice.

This is why we use the #4opens as a practical framework:

Open Data: The data can be accessed, reused and shared under clear, appropriate terms.

Open Source: The code can be inspected, modified and redistributed.

Open Standards: Interfaces and formats make it possible for different systems to communicate and interoperate.

Open Process: The decisions, governance and working practices are visible enough for people to participate and hold power accountable.

These four openings work together, none is a substitute for the others. The path we hope to take from this is rebalance people-to-people before the normal peer-to-peer were decentralization is presented as a technical property. Build a peer-to-peer network, distribute the data, remove the central server and the problem is solved. But a network can be technically decentralized and socially dysfunctional when peers still fight, exclude people, hoard influence and reproduce the same hierarchies found on corporate platforms.

This is also where we encounter the #encryptionist tendency, the belief that cryptography and protocol design can replace the need for human trust and collective responsibility. Encryption is essential where privacy and security require it. It protects people from surveillance and helps keep private communication private. But it cannot decide how a community should resolve a disagreement, distribute responsibility or hold an administrator accountable. Nor can it establish that every person using a system is acting in good faith.

#P2P needs to mean people-to-people before peer-to-peer. The point of decentralized technology should be to strengthen relationships between people and communities, not to pretend those relationships can be engineered away. For developers, this changes the questions we ask. Instead of only asking how to eliminate a central server, we also ask how communities can share infrastructure, moderate their spaces, move between services and maintain control over their collective work.

The technical architecture matters, so does the social architecture. We need to stop rebuilding the same problems Grassroots technology has a familiar cycle. A project emerges with a strong vision, builds useful tools and attracts a community. Over time, technical complexity grows, a small group accumulates influence, participation narrows and the original purpose becomes harder to recognize.

Eventually, people leave or start building something new. The next project promises to solve the previous project’s problems, but often carries the same habits into a fresh codebase. We call this #techchurn, the problem is not that developers experiment or that software needs replacing. It is that we repeatedly invest energy in new technical systems without doing the harder work of changing the social patterns around them.

We reproduce #stupidindividualism: everyone wants autonomy, but few people want the shared responsibilities that make autonomy possible. We fall into blocking and exclusion instead of building workable ways to handle conflict. We mistake technical authority for community legitimacy. And when governance is left informal, power does not disappear. It becomes harder to see.

Someone still decides what gets merged, which features matter, who receives access, which conflicts count and whose complaints are ignored. If these decisions cannot be understood or challenged, an ostensibly open project can become a small technical fiefdom. Open Process means treating governance as part of the infrastructure, not an awkward extra to discuss after the code is written.

That does not mean every code review needs a committee or every decision requires a vote. It means being clear about who decides what, how decisions can be challenged and how responsibility can be shared or handed over. Good technical work should make those relationships more accountable, not hide them behind complexity.

Build infrastructure for the commons – the #4opens are not another badge to put on a project website. They are a way to ask whether our technology helps communities build and maintain shared resources. A commons is more than something that is free to download. It involves people who use, contribute to and take responsibility for a shared resource, with practices that help keep it useful and prevent it from being captured by a narrow interest.

This matters for grassroots media, community archives, local networks and the wider #Fediverse. These projects need more than software that runs. They need ways to preserve collective memory, share information across communities, moderate public spaces and maintain infrastructure beyond the lifetime or interests of any single developer.

For the Open Media Network (#OMN), this means thinking about media as shared objects moving through trusted community flows, rather than treating every platform as a separate walled garden. It means connecting projects through open standards and bridges, while leaving communities room to make their own decisions. The goal is not to build one giant system that controls everyone. It is to help local projects work together without surrendering their autonomy.

That is a different technical challenge, that asks us to build for interoperability, repair, reuse and community control rather than endless engagement, growth and platform replacement. To find this path we need to look for the gaps, perhaps the code is open but the data is trapped, perhaps the protocol is open but the project has no workable way for its community to influence development. Perhaps the governance looks good on paper but all the practical knowledge sits with one exhausted administrator.

These are not reasons to dismiss a project, they are places to start improving it. You can help document systems so others can maintain them. You can make data easier to move. You can build bridges between existing projects instead of another isolated platform. You can help communities share moderation and maintenance. You can make governance visible without turning every small task into a bureaucratic exercise.

Above all, you can work with the people who will actually use and maintain the tools to move from technical skill to collective power. The wider problem is political. Corporate platforms concentrate power because their business models reward extraction, dependency and control. Replacing their code without challenging those relationships will not get us very far.

We need to stop treating every failure as an invitation to start another platform. We need to connect our technical work to existing grassroots communities, shared resources and the practical struggle to build alternatives. The #4opens offer a simple starting point. They help us ask not only whether technology works, but who it works for, who controls it and whether people can collectively change it.

For technologists, this is an invitation to bring your skills into a bigger conversation. You do not have to become a political theorist, abandon your craft or agree on every detail. You do need to recognize that technical decisions shape social power, whether or not we choose to discuss that openly. The challenge is not simply to write more open code, it is to build open, usable and accountable infrastructure that people can make their own.

Build tools people can understand, share what they need to maintain them. Connect projects rather than trapping them. Make decisions visible. Help communities develop the confidence and capacity to govern their own infrastructure. That is how we move beyond the #geekproblem and begin to compost #techchurn into something more useful.

Open the code. Open the data. Open the standards. Open the process. Put people first. That is the #4opens. That is a practical starting point for rebuilding the #openweb as a grassroots Commons.

Composting the mess, growing the alternative commons paths

Online and offline, we are living through an interconnected crisis of ecological breakdown, economic inequality, political disillusionment and social fragmentation that are not separate problems. They feed into each other, creating #mainstreaming paths that are increasingly unable to meet basic social and environmental needs.

The usual response to this now visible mess is to ask the same institutions that created these problems to keep managing the consequences. the chattering classes that run our governments promise new policies, corporations promise new technologies, and professional campaigners promise another round of reform. There people are inside the worship of the #deathcult, and their efforts are constrained by the paths they walk, endless growth, profit extraction, bureaucracy, electoral cycles and the concentration of #nastyfew power.

So this now visible mess, is not only a problem of individual greed or corruption, it is structural. That the #mainstreaming paths keep reproducing the problems because of the unthinking relationships remain unchanged. From common sense, and the #OMN perspective, this is where we need to change the conversation, to not keep relying on better management of #deathcult paths – we need to build the practical foundations of something different.

The old idea of #commons (a polite way of saying #communism) offers a grassroots path away from this spreading political frustration towards practical collective paths. This new path is based on older anarchist ideas, that are critical of the two dominant ways of organizing: the market and the state. Were we are told to buy what we need through commercial markets or campaign for governments to provide it. Yes, maybe both have their place, but neither gives communities any real much control over the resources and paths they need to grow.

So what is the idea of commons? let look at this, commons exists when people share responsibility for resources, establish collective “rules” and manage those resources for mutual benefit. This can mean land, housing, food, energy, knowledge, software, media or the infrastructure that connects communities. The point is that a Commons is not simply something owned collectively, it is something people actively maintain and govern together.

Examples, at a grassroots level, a community garden, a housing cooperative, a repair café, an open-source project and a grassroots media network can all be part of this path. They look different, but each creates space for people to become participants rather than remaining consumers, clients or spectators.

From a practical #DIY path we need to move past the #blocking of thinking of a utopian blueprint waiting for the right political moment. Commons already exist, our work is to strengthen them, learn from their successes and failures, and connect them, in the #OMN work using technology to widen political and economic alternatives.

It is about moving from spectators to participants, the most damaging consequences of our current blinded political culture is the loss of agency. People are repeatedly told that the important decisions are made elsewhere: by governments, corporations, financial markets, technical experts or professional #NGO organizations.

This path has lead to years of broken promises, so it is little surprise many withdraw. Some become cynical about politics; others retreat into, conspiracy, private life or the exhausting routines of survival in late stage capitalism. We can see this only as apathy, when it is a reasonable response to having little meaningful influence or power.

People need practical ways to take part in shaping their lives. Communing offers this through experience, people come together around a shared need, make decisions, distribute responsibilities, deal with disagreements and see the results of their work. They develop the skills and relationships that make further collective action possible.

This is political activity, even when nobody calls it politics – a community that takes control of its housing, food supply, energy or media infrastructure is not merely providing a service. It is changing who has power, who makes decisions and who benefits from the resources being created. The political shift is from asking those above us to solve everything towards building the collective capacity to solve more of it ourselves.

So yes our path is to build the new, but understand the struggle, that meeting real needs to make the old arrangements less necessary. This is a valuable corrective to a political culture that is trapped in permanent resistance, to do more than protest against enclosure, extraction and corporate power, we need to create shared resources that people can actually use.

But we should not mistake this for the idea that politics can be avoided. The existing system does not simply disappear because we build something better. Land, housing, infrastructure and productive resources are already controlled by power if #nastyfew interests and our own common sense. Communities face legal barriers, financial pressures, unequal access to time and skills, and the constant risk that successful initiatives will be absorbed, commercialized or captured by institutions.

Building the Commons is therefore both constructive and political. We create alternatives while challenging the conditions that prevent them from flourishing. The path is not to fight every battle on the opponent’s ground, more to develop enough practical capacity, shared resources and collective confidence that we have more choices about where and how to struggle.

The Commons needs protection against capture – shared ownership does not guarantee a fair or democratic path. A blinded commons might reproduce the same inequalities it set out to overcome. A closed group can accumulate informal power, technical experts become gatekeepers, and participation reduced to approving decisions made elsewhere.

This is where governance projects like the #OGB matter, communities need transparent processes, meaningful participation, accountability, accessible conflict resolution and ways to challenge people who accumulate too much control. Responsibilities shared, decisions remain open to scrutiny, and resources be protected from being quietly transferred back into private ownership.

The same principle applies to funding, yes, grants and investment help build useful infrastructure, but they can also redirect projects towards the priorities of founders. We need ways to bring resources into community control without allowing outside money to take control of the community.

The aim is to make the Commons durable without turning it into another institution that exists primarily to sustain itself. To help with this we need to move from isolated projects to a grassroots networks. A single local project can meet a local need, a connected network of projects begin to become change and change communities.

This is the idea of an wider Commons: many #4opens independent initiatives, rooted in their own places and circumstances, sharing knowledge and resources while retaining local autonomy. We do not need every community to follow the same path. Different places have different needs, histories, cultures and resources, diversity is a strength. Some experiments will fail; others will work well enough to be adapted elsewhere. What matters is that people can learn from one another instead of repeatedly starting from scratch.

Open-source #FOSS software is part of the answer, but it is not enough. We need grassroots digital infrastructure that is open in practice: open data, open source, open standards and open processes -the #4opens – combined with trust, human moderation and community responsibility.

Technical federation, like #activitypub allows this to grow without centralization were communities share tools, infrastructure, experience and political influence without handing their decisions to a distant headquarters. This is a space where grassroots organization becomes a bigger political path. Connected together, we can become the material foundations of a different social order. The process is gradual, uneven and full of conflict. But it creates something that symbolic politics alone cannot: an expanding body of people with practical experience of doing things differently.

The #OMN projects are a direct connection to grassroots media and the #openweb. Communities need to communicate, preserve their histories, share knowledge and coordinate action. Yet much of our digital public life is controlled by the #dotcons: commercial platforms that turn participation into a resource to extract, measure and sell. With our unthinking #fashionistas even supposedly alternative spaces become dependent on centralized platforms, opaque moderation and technical gate-keeping.

The #OMN is not another social media platform. It is a path towards shared grassroots infrastructure for news, archiving and, further down the road, governance. The aim is to help communities create and manage their own media resources, while connecting their work through open networks rather than surrendering control to the normal centralized platforms.

Media is part of the political infrastructure of the Commons. If communities cannot tell their own stories, preserve their own histories or communicate beyond corporate channels, their capacity to organize is weakened. A grassroots #openweb can help make local knowledge visible, allow successful experiments to be copied and give independent initiatives ways to connect. It can help turn scattered projects into a living network without requiring them to become one large organization.

From the local to the political – the commons is not a replacement for every form of politics. We still need struggles over public policy, land, housing, workers’ rights, ecological protection and the distribution of wealth. We need to challenge the power that keeps resources enclosed and decisions out of public hands. But these struggles become stronger when they are connected to practical alternatives.

A housing campaign can do more than oppose unaffordable rents if it also helps build community-owned housing. A food campaign can do more than expose an unjust supply chain if it develops cooperative ways to grow and distribute food. A media campaign can do more than criticize corporate #dotcons and #traditionalmedia platforms if it helps build shared, community-controlled infrastructure like the #fedivers.

This is how the commons becomes part of a bigger political path, not by asking everyone to agree on one path, but by connecting the practical work people are already doing around shared needs. The work provides a meeting point between people who might disagree about theory but can cooperate around tech, housing, energy, care, media or the future of their neighbourhood. Shared practice builds relationships, and those relationships support wider political action.

Over time, these connected efforts move resources out of extractive circuits and into forms of ownership and governance that serve the people who sustain them. This is a material shift in power, not just a change in language. The work starts where we are, there is no single blueprint, central plan or perfect organization that will deliver this transformation. The commons grows through people trying things, sharing what they learn and building on one another ‘s work.

That means starting with real needs, keeping projects accessible, making decisions accountable and sharing the tools and knowledge that others can reuse. It means accepting that communities are messy, that conflict is unavoidable and that trust has to be built through practice rather than demanded as a slogan.

It also means resisting the #geekproblem, the idea that the right technical system can solve social problems. Technology supports relationships and participation, not replaces them. The same applies to political organizations, structure matters, but it needs to remain accountable to the people doing the work.

We need to move beyond the choice between endlessly criticizing the existing system and retreating into disconnected #blocking. We build practical Commons while connecting them into a wider movement to challenging the mess that keeps people powerless.

The current #mainstreaming encourages us to see ourselves as isolated individuals competing for security and influence. The commons begins somewhere else, with the recognition that much of what makes life possible is already shared, and that we can organize more of it around mutual care and collective responsibility.

This is a political choice, to shifts power from extraction towards participation, from passive consumption towards communing, and from centralized control towards connected grassroots autonomy.

For #OMN, the task is to help build the media and digital infrastructure that makes this possible, on this path we do not have to wait for permission. We do have to do the work, learn from our mistakes, protect what we build and connect with others doing the same.

Build locally, share openly, govern together, connect without centralizing is how we begin to grow a different future from the ground up.

Democratic Resilience: a report back

I went to the #Oxford event tonight with a slightly awkward position in mind. Before going, I wrote that the #mainstreaming people would probably be idealistic about cynical politics, while I was going to be cynical about idealistic politics. My aim wasn’t to pick a fight. I wanted to stay positive, avoid the usual political trench warfare, and try to build a bridge between idealism and the messy reality of power.

The event was “Democratic Resilience: What Do We Need to Know?”, a panel at the Blavatnik School of Government looking at how democratic institutions might respond to democratic backsliding. The panel brought together a selection of the political and intellectual chattering classes: senior figures from politics, academia, law, international institutions and civil society. The question was how governments, civil society, universities, businesses and international organizations can make democracy more resilient.

It was an important question, but as the evening went on, I increasingly felt that my cynicism had won. I wasn’t given the opportunity to ask what I thought was the uncomfortable horizontal question: With the hard shift to the right, accelerating #climatechaos, and the clear failure of the liberal class over the last 50 years, are the institutions they are trying to save actually fit for purpose? If we are facing the next forty years of serious systemic social and ecological backdown, we may need something closer to wartime socialist planning simply to hold our societies and civilization together.

So the question I did not put to the room was simple: Are the institutions you are focusing on actually capable of doing that job? Or are we watching the last gasps of a fading political and intellectual chattering class?

That is why my cynicism kicks in. One speaker talked about progressive #mainstreaming, but the solution still sounded bureaucratic and top-down. Another perspective came from a legal and institutional tradition that was confident in the existing structures. There was always a blinded sense of trying to protect the system without asking whether the system itself needs fundamental change.

There was some discussion of horizontal organization, grassroots capacity, open infrastructure, local participation. These are important ideas, and I was glad they were being discussed. But the final answer was always focused on using these approaches as tools to get people back into the institutions and forms of power they were assumed, by the people in the room, to belong in.

Looking at the last 50 years, I think there is a much more basic question, is that still useful? Perhaps the problem is not that people have lost access to power, perhaps some of the structures being pushed at events like this are parts of the problem. That we may need to grow new forms of resilience from the bottom up, real native horizontal organization, grassroots capacity as ways of rebuilding social capacity outside the increasingly brittle institutions these people fixate on.

That is one of the reasons I keep coming back to on the #openweb and projects like the #OMN. Were the point is to give people better tools to build the capacity for communities to organize, communicate, cooperate and govern themselves in different ways. Tonight reinforced my feeling that we need both idealism and cynicism to move away from the path this room sees as normal.

Keep the idealism about what society could become and keep the cynicism about institutions, power, and the assumption that existing structures will somehow fix themselves. The useful question that was not space to ask was: What kinds of institutions and social structures do we actually need for the next forty years – and are we building them yet?

That is the uncomfortable conversation I think we need to have.

#Oxford

On a positive note on shoveling this kinda mess, we need to see the difference between power struggle politics and organizing. Power struggle politics can keep going forever, even if you win, the same struggle comes back because the underlying structures haven’t changed. That is part of the 20th-century political legacy we need to move beyond.

Good organizing doesn’t mean having no conflict, every real group has disagreements, arguments and difficult personalities. The important question is, does the conflict stop the work from growing? Some of the best movements have had serious internal disagreements and still managed to be productive. The problem is when conflict becomes the work – when energy goes into controlling each other instead of building something together.

This is also where good open technology can help. Used well, transparency makes patterns of behaviour visible instead of hiding them inside closed meetings and informal power structures. So the goal isn’t a conflict-free movement, it is where conflict doesn’t consume the capacity to act.

That feels like a very 21st-century organizing problem.

Update: My report back from the Oxford discussion on “Democratic Resilience” left me thinking about a basic problem. They talked about grassroots capacity, horizontal organization and open infrastructure, but mostly as ways of getting people back into existing institutions.

I think we need to turn that around, when the existing institutions are becoming increasingly brittle, and have helped produce many of the problems we now face, why are we still treating them as the destination?

We need to build new capacity from the bottom up, recognizing that there are already different paths developing: institutional, grassroots, #openweb, #FOSS, federated and community-based. They don’t all have to become the same thing, the goal should be mutual recognition and practical bridges between them.

So democratic resilience is more about balancing protecting the institutions we already have and having the courage to build the ones we are going to need.

#organizing #openweb #4opens #OMN #KISS

Can the #openweb reboot scale without copying the #dotcons?

There is a recurring argument about the #Fediverse that starts with a reasonable question of how can the Fediverse scale? So why, because, yes, it doesn’t yet have the same ease of use as mainstream social media. Infrastructure can be fragile. Servers can struggle when large numbers of people arrive at once. Developers need support and servers cost money. There are no universal performance guarantees, and there isn’t a single business model paying for the whole system. All of that is real.

But underneath this question is a important distinction. Are we trying to scale a platform, or are we trying to scale a network of communities? Those are not the same project, platform scale versus network scale. The #dotcons are built around platform scaling, the basic model is: one organization → one platform → millions of users → centralized infrastructure → centralized governance → monetized attention. The objective is to get as many people as possible onto the same system.

The Fediverse nativly comes from a different tradition, its #KISS path is: many communities → many servers → open protocols → federation → local autonomy → shared network. The objective isn’t necessarily to put everyone in the same place, it is to allow different places to connect. That is the central distinction that gets ignored by mainstreaming crew in discussions about “scaling the Fediverse”.

Scaling the platform is not the same as scaling the network, if we take the #dotcons model as our definition of success, then the Fediverse will always look deficient. It doesn’t have one company providing everything, have one business model funding everything, it doesn’t have one #UX controlling everyone, or one central authority making all the decisions. But these aren’t simply missing features, they are features we deliberately don’t want to reproduce.

The common sense question shouldn’t be – why isn’t the #Fediverse more like mainstream social media? The more need focus should be on – how do we make a federated network of communities sustainable at much larger scale? That is a different engineering, economic and social problem, a different idea of scale.

The problem we need to compost is then when #mainstreaming blindness asks – how do we get millions of people onto one platform? The openweb asks – how do we make thousands or millions of people able to participate in sustainable communities that can connect to each other? That is still scale, it is distributed scale rather than centralized scale. Instead of building one giant machine capable of containing everyone, we build a network of autonomous communities capable of supporting themselves while remaining interoperable. This is native to the historic logic of the #openweb.

This changes the #UX question, the cultural problem that is easy to mistake for a UX problem #mainstreaming common sense talks about. The #dotcons have spent years developing effective systems for capturing attention, infinite feeds, control algorithms, notifications, status competition, engagement metrics pushing personalized outrage. Constant “novelty”, better named as people becoming accustomed to digital drugs. So the mainstreaming “fix” is “why doesn’t this work like the platforms I’m used to?” But if the alternative simply reproduces the same addictive relationship between people and media, we haven’t built anything at all that we need, and the will still be no alternative.

Our native project we have worked so hard on for the last 50 years, is not only about changing the plumbing, its better understood as drug detox. The openweb needs working detox, what we do not need is a “better” version of the same addiction. The current reboot needs a different relationship with media to move from passive consumption towards participation – publish → participate → moderate → organize → build. This is the reasons the #OMN is interested in the federated flow #UX question.

The aim isn’t to make another platform that is easier to consume, it is to make participation easier than consumption. On this different path the #mainstreaming people still have veiled points, but the problem is they still use these to push us down bad paths. Yes, distributed doesn’t mean free, and this distinction should not become an excuse for ignoring the real material problems. Servers cost money, developers need to live, systems need maintenance, communities need resources, infrastructure needs reliability.

You cannot wish these problems away, but to rebalance this we do have seed paths, platform cooperatives are one possible response. Shared ownership and cooperative funding can provide useful ways of sustaining infrastructure and development. But this needed “business model” is not the same thing as a governance model.

And this is where the argument gets more interesting, the governance problem. Once we accept that the #Fediverse is a network rather than a platform, we need governance appropriate to a network, with questions like: Who decides? Who represents whom? How do autonomous communities resolve conflicts? How are shared resources managed? How do communities negotiate with powerful external organizations? What happens when commercial interests arrive? And how do we prevent a small number of organizations from becoming permanent gatekeepers?

These aren’t abstract questions, the more successful the #openweb becomes, the more contested it will become. The #dotcons have enormous resources and existing user bases. Governments, NGOs, foundations and commercial interests will also have reasons to influence an increasingly important open network. So governance needs to be designed before concentrated power becomes embedded.

The historical disagreement, the difference between the two approaches becomes clearer. One path says – The Fediverse needs to become sustainable enough to compete with Big Tech. Build better infrastructure, develop business models, support developers and perhaps use platform cooperatives.

The other says – yes, we need sustainable infrastructure – but don’t define success as becoming another Big Tech platform. Build the economic and governance systems around federation rather than replacing federation with centralization. These positions overlap on many practical problems, they diverge over the path of the thing being built. One starts from the platform, the other starts from the network. That distinction matters because the governance that follows will be different.

This is the gap that led to the #OGB – the Openweb Governance Body. The proposal for a native governance layer for a federated network. Using the same principles that make federation possible – autonomous communities, open protocols, distributed participation, federation between communities, local decision-making, shared standards, negotiation and mediation, accountability between participating groups.

In other words governance that follows the architecture, rather than creating one institution above the network, building ways for the communities within the network to coordinate. Governance between communities “Who should control the Fediverse?” – “How can autonomous communities govern their relationships with each other?” very different questions.

A community shouldn’t have to surrender its autonomy in order to participate, different groups should be able to connect, negotiate, delegate, challenge decisions and coordinate around shared problems. Governance becomes a network capability, rather than a permanent hierarchy sitting above the network. Institutions can still exist, foundations can still exist, cooperatives can still exist. The important thing is that they don’t become synonymous with the network itself.

#OMN is the media version of the same problem – how do we build federated media flows where communities publish, subscribe, moderate, archive and share information without handing ownership of the whole media environment to a platform? #OMN and #OGB are therefore two parts of the same larger project to build the social infrastructure needed for a federated openweb to remain federated as it grows.

The technology matters, #ActivityPub matters, federation matters, #FOSS matters. But none of these automatically produce a healthy social system, they are tools. The culture, economics and governance built around them matter just as much. Don’t scale the wrong thing, is the central lesson.

We should absolutely work on reliability, infrastructure, sustainability and usability, but we should stop treating the #dotcons platform model as the measuring stick for anything. Scaling a platform means concentrating more people and resources into one system, scaling a federated network means enabling more autonomous communities to participate and connect. Those are fundamentally different forms of scale.

What we need to compost is the mainstreaming mess of when we “forget” the historical openweb wasn’t created because people wanted a slightly nicer version of #Facebook. What these people forget is that it came from a different idea of what networked communication could be. The challenge, what we need to support, now is to preserve and develop that difference while dealing realistically with money, infrastructure, scale, governance and the arrival of powerful actors.

So please focus – the real question isn’t simply, can the Fediverse scale? It is, can a federated network scale without turning itself into a platform? And underneath that is can the openweb grow without becoming the thing it was built to replace? A basic #KISS governance problem, that is why we need to build the alternatives now, before the vacuum is filled for us.

The practical #OGB

Federation, not a central organization – OGB isn’t one body governing everyone. It is a federated governance layer that communities, projects and servers can participate in.
#ActivityPub native, were overnance functions are distributed through the same federation model as the #Fediverse. Groups can communicate, propose, delegate, challenge and record decisions across organizational boundaries.
Permissionless participation as the is no central gatekeeper deciding who is allowed to join the governance network. Communities can connect when they meet the basic protocol/social requirements.
Affinity groups rather than permanent representatives, were people organize around issues, projects or communities. Authority comes from participation and demonstrated trust, rather than simply holding an institutional position.
Sortition and recall. Where representatives are needed, selection is based on sortition rather than elections or permanent appointment. Delegates remain accountable and can be recalled.
Dilution of concentrated power. No person, organization or community is able to accumulate permanent control. Roles, influence and decision-making capacity are deliberately distributed.
Voices rather than a single leadership. A small rotating group of 3–5 “Voices” provides coordination and a public interface without becoming a permanent ruling committee.
Governance as a protocol/social practice. The important thing isn’t creating another institution, it’s creating a shared way for autonomous communities to negotiate with each other.

So in the current Fediverse the example is:

#SWF governance through an institution.
#OGB governance between federated communities.

And that fits the #openweb because the governance path follows the architecture – distributed, federated, contestable and permissionless, rather than the normal default common sense of centralized ownership. The interesting bit is that #OGB doesn’t have to replace existing institutions, it can talk to them, mediate with them, and provide a counterweight to them while the #openweb remains open.

#KISS

Bunker as a metaphor

There is something revealing about the way powerful people talk about our future, when they imagine crisis, they imagine their escape. A luxury bunker, fortress border, a private city, a rocket or an #AI cloud. A place for the self chosen few to survive while everyone else is left outside to die.

This is the “logic” of the #deathcult we all worship, if the world is breaking, protect yourself rather than repair the world. It should be obverse to us that this is is not really any actual plan for the future, its just more head down worship, an admission that this class have stopped believing in any thing at all.

But, yes they hid this, they still tend to tell a story, the shiny version of this story is always the same, out of catastrophe comes a golden city, the old world burns, the rubble is cleared, and the self selecting few build something beautiful on top of it.

We have heard this story for thousands of years, apocalypse, judgement, Armageddon, collapse, then purification for paradise for the few survivors. The modern retelling simply replaces heaven with a billionaire bunker, an exclusive smart city, an AI utopia or a colony on Mars, different technology, same path.

On this #mainstreaming path some people, who we call the #nastyfew in the #OMN hashtag story, deserve to survive the mess they created. But what is not told in this simply story is that the bunker is hard right politics – #climatechaos, pandemics, resource conflicts, economic insecurity and technological disruption are real problems. But there are two very different ways to respond to systemic crisis.

One response is – How do we protect everyone and make the system more resilient?

The other is – How do I make sure I am on the inside when it collapses?

The second path is not surprisingly increasingly visible in #nastyfew billionaire culture, authoritarian politics and in the #dotcons industry we all spend way to much time inside.

in this modern story, the bunker is not just a building underground, it is a political metaphor, fortress borders are bunkers, private security is a bunker, gated communities are bunkers, #closedweb platforms are bunkers. What matters for us in #FOSS is monopolized infrastructure is a bunker. Even the fantasy of escaping humanity through #AI or space is another bunker, an attempt to leave the shared social and ecological world rather than compost our dysfunctional relationship with it.

This path is the opposite of the #openweb,it is were the #deathcult turns fear into control. The right-wing answer to social crisis is always built around fear – Fear of outsiders, fear of immigrants, fear of social change, fear of losing status, fear of disorder, fear of the future. But, then comes the golden lie, the promise, we will protect you, but this protection soon becomes control. The anger that should be directed toward concentrated wealth and political power gets redirected sideways and downwards toward other ordinary people.

The poor become the problem, migrants become the problem, minorities become the problem, the left becomes the problem. The messy complexity of society is reduced to enemies, it is an old political trick that the #blinded technological #closedweb makes much more powerful. Today’s authoritarian politics doesn’t arrive wearing an old-fashioned uniform. the phone in our pocket, influencers, algorithms, targeted advertising, surveillance systems, AI-generated propaganda and permanently monetised outrage. The infrastructure of the #dotcons is a bunker.

But what we focus on the #OMN path is there is alternative, this alternative isn’t pretending that everything is fine, not another shiny utopia, and it certainly isn’t waiting for some perfect political party, perfect technology or perfect leader to save us. The alternative is much more boring – Build things that work, trust, commons, local resilience. Create media systems where communities can see and understand what is happening. Focus more on building technologies that people can actually control by #KISS keeping the infrastructure understandable so participation is possible. Create spaces where people can disagree without immediately becoming enemies. That sounds much less exciting than an AI god or a $50 million survival bunker, good, what we need to do as the #DIY grassroots is move from bunkers to bridges

The important question is not, who gets into the bunker? The question is, what are we building outside it? Because humans have already built an enormous number of bunkers, political bunkers, economic bunkers, cultural bunkers, technological bunkers, information bunkers. We don’t need more, we need bridges, and bridges are fundamentally different from bunkers.

A bunker protects something by excluding people, a bridge creates value by connecting people. That is the deeper #openweb possibility – not a technological escape from society, but technology that helps society organize itself. Not centralized control, but distributed participation, not ownership of everything, but stewardship of shared resources, not fear as the organizing principle, but trust. Not “how do I survive when everything collapses?” but “How do we make collapse less likely, and life better, together?”

Its about composting the apocalypse – the world really is messy, but fear doesn’t have to become a bunker, it can become a reason to organize. This is where social composting matters, take the accumulated waste of the last decades — #neoliberalism, authoritarianism, #techshit, platform capitalism, political tribalism, broken institutions and the endless fear machine. Don’t pretend it isn’t there, don’t worship it or spend your entire life fighting it head-on. Compost it, break it down, learn from it, keep what is useful, let the dead parts become soil to then grow something different.

The #deathcult says the future belongs to the #nastyfew who can buy their way out, the #lifecult says the future belongs to those who can build relationships strong enough to stay. The choice isn’t really between apocalypse and utopia, it is between bunkering down or building commons. The planet doesn’t need another billionaire bunker, it needs people willing to pick up shovels.

A #mainstreaming view of this

#OMN #openweb #4opens #commons #lifecult #deathcult #dotcons #socialcomposting #KISS

The #openweb is #4opens, where dues this place the current #AI path?

To understand and walk this, lets look at an example of the mess we need to compost – by lifting the lid on the current #AI noise. The problem, isn’t simply whether #AI is intelligent; it is who controls the infrastructure, what incentives drive it, and whether technology serves people or turns people into components of the machine. When can see this we might be able to see, thus act on the #OMN trajectory: technology → power → participation → open infrastructure → commons, let try and get past the #fashionista mess of whether #AI is or isn’t “really intelligent.” as this is a lot of #mainstreaming noise.

AI is going to take all our jobs.
AI is going to transform everything.
AI is going to become conscious.
AI is going to kill us.
AI is going to save us.

Some of these claims might be true, some are noise and others certainly nonsense. The more useful questions are simpler – Who controls the technology, what are they trying to achieve, and who gets to decide how it is used? This is where the #OMN view of technology starts, don’t believe the hype – but don’t ignore the technology.

One of the problems we need to mediate, is, we should be careful about criticizing AI by repeating the claims made by the #dotcons (AI companies). If a company tells us its system is basically becoming a digital human, and we respond by saying “yes, but this digital human is dangerous”, we have already accepted their framing, we are helping improve there profits and power by repeating there story.

The same thing happens with the last generation of #dotcons, #Facebook told us its algorithm understands us, #Google tells us its systems are intelligent, #AI companies tell us their models are reasoning. Most of this is smoke and mirrors that we should be ignoring if we actually wont to see anything real.

This next #dotcons #AI boom involves enormous amounts of investment in computing infrastructure, data centres, chips and energy. The companies involved are under pressure to keep growing because the financial system only rewards growth. This produces a dangerous feedback loop, a company needs to keep growing as investors expect growth, the company therefore needs a new story about future growth, the technology becomes that story. The investment creates infrastructure, the infrastructure creates pressure to find uses for it, the uses become evidence that the technology is inevitable. Then more investment follows, it isn’t only a conspiracy, it is a #KISS system of incentives.

The better approach for us is to look underneath the noise. Q. What does the system actually do? What infrastructure does it require? Who pays for it? Who owns it? Who benefits? What happens when it fails? What happens to the workers? What happens to the users? What happens to the communities around it? All are more interesting than arguing about whether a snake oil chatbot is “really thinking”.

And this is an important #OMN lesson – technology does not exist outside society – the code is one layer, underneath the code are ownership, money, labour, institutions, energy, law, culture and power, when we get distracted and ignore those lower layers we don’t understand the technology at all. When this happens the mess we constantly have to compost is that this pushing of #techchurn isn’t innovation. We’ve seen this before, #web02 was going to transform everything, then crypto, NFTs. Then the metaverse, and then whatever the next shiny thing was.

Each wave arrived with claims about revolutionary transformation, yes some of the technologies were useful, but the investment system doesn’t reward usefulness, it rewards growth stories. This produces #techchurn, endless technological change driven partly by the need to find the next thing to invest in, rather than by any clearly identified social need. This is not new, we have been pushing this kinda mess since the industrial revolution.

So, how can we compost this mainstreaming mess, one path we tried and it kinda worked in the 20 century was socialism, or in the western guise social democracy. This is a different politics from simply saying “technology bad”. That older question takes us directly into #4opens territory were there is another mythology we need to challenge – Markets don’t produce good technology, the idea that if a technology is useful, the market will automatically discover the best version of it. History doesn’t support this well, this is why the #openweb matters. A genuinely open network gives people alternative paths. Open standards reduce #dotcons lock-in. Open source makes systems modifiable. Open data makes information reusable. Open process makes power visible.

The fourth one of these is especially important, so that the social consequences of technology aren’t hidden inside the code. We can find them hidden inside the process, who funded the project? Who decided the priorities? Who was consulted? Who wasn’t? Who owns the infrastructure? Who gets to change it? Who carries the social and ecological risk? Who gets the benefit? If those questions aren’t visible, the technology is normally reproducing the same old power structures, we need to compost.

This mess is not only to be found in technological we can use the #4opens to look and judge social paths. The same thing happens with markets, with bureaucracies, algorithms. The system follows its incentives, consequences emerge from the interaction between the system and the world. This is the reason #KISS matters, don’t invent unnecessary mythology when a simpler explanation works.

Open source is a social technology, one of the strengths of #FOSS is that people can inspect the system. That doesn’t magically make it secure, but it creates a culture in which claims can be challenged, problems exposed and were people can build alternatives. The current #mainstreaming path is not this, its repeating trust us:

Trust the company.

Trust the algorithm.

Trust the secret model.

Trust the security team.

Trust the executives.

Trust the experts.

Trust the investor story.

That is the kind of technological hierarchy that the native #openweb paths needs to challenging with a shovel. Native paths, need native technologies, with community participation, not #dotcons or #geekproblem technologies of obedience. Our path is about composting the layer of abstraction between people and reality – technology can make people more capable or it can make people more manageable, this simply understanding is what makes #OMN a shovel.

The #OMN isn’t trying to build another AI-powered social media platform or creating a better algorithm, it isn’t trying to replace one technological priesthood with another, the #OMN is much more basic.

News.
Archiving.
And eventually, down the road, governance.

The idea is to build infrastructure where people participate in the flows of information rather than being only consumers. Events come into the network – People and communities add context – Stories connect and organize those events – Objects move between nodes – Metadata gets added and corrected – Different communities can see different things – Useful information can spread – Useless information is allowed to decay.

And, nobody has to maintain one giant master database containing the “correct” version of reality. This is a what we call a #datasoup, messy, living, federated information environment. And that mess isn’t weakness, it becomes the very resilience we need. Distributed systems need distributed understanding.

The #OMN path is deliberately different from the dominant AI model, were the dominant model says: collect everything → centralize it → train the model → produce the answer. The #OMN is closer to: collect from many places → connect → tag → contextualize → challenge → correct → archive → feed back into the network.

As I keep saying, this is not an attempt to create a perfect database, it is an attempt to create flows of trust. The network flows become the process of understanding. That is why federation matters, open process matters, why human moderation matters. It is why disagreement matters, and why we don’t need another central algorithm deciding what everybody should see.

In our current economics: People are inputs, workers are costs. Communities become markets. Attention becomes a resource. Knowledge becomes training data. Care becomes an inefficiency. That should reveal to you the common sense #deathcult mess we need to compost. That is the #OMN path, technology is a tool, the question that matters is who holds it, who maintains it, who benefits from it, and what kind of society it helps us to build.

Care is missing in the current mess, in a better world, a worker cares about the person using the product, a journalist cares whether the information is true, a nurse cares whether the patient gets better, a programmer cares whether the software actually works, a community cares whether its infrastructure remains useful after the funding runs out. This is difficult to understand for only automated paths because care isn’t an optimization problem, it is a social relationship.

The future doesn’t need more technological priests, it needs people able to pick up the tools, understand how they work, challenge the assumptions behind them and use them together.

That is the #openweb path, that is #4opens.

A more progressive liberal view of this same #AI mess

#OMN #openweb #4opens #FOSS #AI #automation #techchurn #techshit #dotcons #geekproblem #commons #KISS

People moved right becouse the #deathcult pushing of insecurity and distrust has been uncomposted for 50 years

Currently we are to stuck in the liberal response to the current hard rightward shift, as they treat it like a fixed demographic fact. “Those people won’t move.” “Those voters are lost.” “Reform has captured them.” then comes more polling, messaging, focus groups, electoral strategy and process. This is the #geekproblem applied to blinded #fashernist liberal politics: treating a living social system like a technical problem that can be managed from above. But people don’t live inside polling data, they live in communities, institutions, workplaces, families, streets, media systems and increasingly broken #dotcons digital spaces.

And when this #mainstreaming stops giving people security, meaning or trust, something will fill the gap. If government doesn’t deliver, people look elsewhere, institutions aren’t trusted, people look for identity, communities are fragmented, people look for tribes. If #mainstreaming politics can’t offer a believable future, people reach for something that feels solid now. That is why sectarian identity becomes attractive in an age of inchoate policy, captured institutions and bad-faith politics.

At least identity feels tangible, I know who I am, who they are, and I know who is to blame. It is a crude form of social infrastructure, but it is still infrastructure. And this is where the liberal framing goes wrong, the “rightward shift” isn’t some mysterious virus that has infected society, it is a feeding on the very probels our 40 years of worshiping a neo-liberal #deathcult has produced, on broken social trust, insecurity, precarity, housing insecurity, broken public services and loss of community that leads directly to political powerlessness.

And the constant experience of being told that everything is improving while your lived experience says otherwise. You don’t compost that with better messaging, you don’t shoval it with another consultation, you don’t defeat it by telling people they are stupid, racist, backward or “misinformed”. You certainly don’t challange it by becoming better at managing the same broken system.

You change the conditions that produce the politics, this is where the #OMN way of thinking matters. Start with the social infrastructure, build trust, participation to grow commons with space for paths where people see the evidence, challenge it, add context and correct mistakes. Build spaces where people do things together rather than simply consuming politics through algorithmic feeds.

That is how trust grows, from paths where the #4opens is more than a technical checklist. Because open process lets people see how power actually works, it turns politics from something done to people into something people can participate in. Communities become visible without first getting permission from the #mainstreaming machine. Where trust is something built through participation rather than handed down by an authority. Where disagreement isn’t automatically treated as failure. Where mistakes can be corrected rather than silently buried. Where history isn’t constantly erased by the next algorithmic cycle.

You don’t solve the rightward shift by endlessly talking about the rightward shift, you rebalence the social conditions underneath it. The right-wing understands something that much of the liberal centre has forgotten – people need belonging. The nasty mess we currently need to compost is allowing belonging to grow from fear, exclusion and enemies. Make people safer, communities stronger, open up space were people can build together.

Because trust is built through doing things together – that is the native #openweb path. We need to compost what the right feeds on: division, so the alternative has to grow from trust. That’s not electoral strategy, its #KISS growing social infrastructure.

The problem isn’t that humans are stupid, maybe its more that we’re just good at organising stupidity. The planet isn’t dying because it hates us, the planet will be fine. It’s the humans who are having the difficult bit, the economic system says: BUY MORE SHIT. Religion says: TRUST THE INVISIBLE AUTHORITY. Politics says: PICK A TEAM. The #dotcons say: KEEP SCROLLING. And the #geekproblem says: DON’T WORRY, WE CAN ENGINEER OUR WAY OUT OF IT.

We’ve pushed a #nastyfew class to avoid any responsibility, and then people on there knes eyes closed wonder why nothing changes. Maybe the useful position is to step back from the social and ecoloical mess long enough to actually we are creating it. Not abandon people, not give up on society, but stop pretending the existing path is working.

The #OMN starts from that uncomfortable place. News. Memory. Trust. Participation. Eventually governance. Not another shiny platform, another central authority. A bit of infrastructure for people to see what is happening, connect it, challenge it, remember it and build something better together.

The planet doesn’t need saving from humans, humans need saving from the #deathcults we so easely worship. And maybe the first step is getting off our knes opening our eyes and looking around at the mess we need to compost.

#OMN #openweb #4opens #commons #FOSS #dotcons #geekproblem #deathcult #KISS

Outreaching, what is the #OMN?

The #OMN (Open Media Network) is “anything in, anything out” network operating through a mediated trust, designed to handle a diverse range of content, data and interactions while leaving communities with the power to decide what they do with that data.

People can also choose their own level of engagement. You can be an active participant – publishing, tagging, moderating, connecting and contributing – or a more passive consumer, following trusted flows of information. The network does not need everyone to participate in the same way.

At its simplest, the #OMN is a “data soup” of tagged data objects flowing through channels, mediated by trust, rather than assuming that everything entering the network is equally valuable, useful or trustworthy, the network allows trust relationships to shape how data moves and how it is consumed.

This creates a different model of media consumption, with no central algorithm deciding what everyone sees, people and communities navigate the data soup through their own relationships, tags, channels and trust networks.

The #OMN is part of what we describe as Web 1.5 were #web01 had many of the things we now need back: openness, decentralisation, interoperability, linking, publishing and the ability for people to build their own spaces. #Web02 took much of that openness and wrapped it in dramatically better user interfaces. That was useful – people quite reasonably liked the easier ways of sharing, communicating and publishing. The problem was what happened next. The platforms became the infrastructure, this infrastructure was privately owned, communities became users, data became a commodity, social relationships became network effects. The #openweb was transformed turned into the #dotcons.

This is the mess we need to compost #Web15 is not about going backwards to Web 1.0. It is about taking the openness and decentralisation of Web 1.0, keeping the useful UX lessons of Web 2.0, and rebuilding the underlying infrastructure as an open, federated commons. That is the path we have taken the first steps on in the #Fediverse and #ActivityPub.

It’s the space the #OMN is working in – a data soup – the metaphor matters, not creating one perfect, clean, central database containing the definitive version of everything. Instead, tagged data objects to flows through networks. Objects can be copied, edited, tagged, linked, filtered, challenged, archived and passed between different communities. Different nodes carry different parts of the soup, some information will be useful in one context and apparently useless in another, that is OK.

The network is deliberately lossy and redundant, information does not have to be complete or perfectly synchronised everywhere, multiple copies and versions can exist, context is added as data flows. Something that appears irrelevant today may become important tomorrow – this is closer to how knowledge actually works than the fantasy of one perfect database.

The #geekproblem tends to see this redundancy, uncertainty and lossy data as technical failures that need to be eliminated. The #OMN sees them as characteristics of a living information network that need to be managed through trust and participation. Flows of trust – not simply the data, it is the flows of trust around the data. Trust becomes part of the network architecture, when people and communities decide which sources, objects, tag, channels and relationships they trust.

That trust can change over time, you don’t have to trust everything, you don’t even have to participate fully. You can follow particular people, communities or channels because you trust them, while ignoring other parts of the network. Someone else can make entirely different choices. This means there is no single central algorithm to decide what is important for everyone, instead, many smaller trust relationships create many overlapping flows through the #datasoup.

Those flows form communities and because they are federated, communities remain distinct while still sharing information and infrastructure. Trust instead of the algorithm is the differences between the #OMN and the #dotcons. The #dotcons operate by extracting social relationships into centralised systems, then using opaque algorithms to decide what people see. The #OMN starts from almost the opposite assumption: people and communities should have more control over the flows they participate in, the context and community relationships do more of the work.

This does not make the network magically free of disagreement, misinformation or bad behaviour. Quite the opposite, it makes those things visible and gives communities tools to respond to them. That is where mediation, moderation, tagging, rollback and open process become important. The network should make it possible for communities to see how things work, participate in decisions, challenge mistakes and build their own projects.

The aim is to take existing tools, protocols and technologies and embed practical federated media/news networks with a good user interface into these existing native #openweb flows. That is where the interesting part begins, real value is not the database, the protocol or the interface, it is the flows that emerge between people, communities, media objects and networks.

Those flows allow communities to form around shared interests, shared histories and shared trust without requiring everyone to belong to the same organisation or use the same interface. A network, not a platform, is better understood as commons infrastructure, rather than another social-media platform.

We build basic infrastructure and lets communities decide what they want to do with it, that is Web 1.5, not a nostalgic return to the old web, not another version of Web 2.0 – an #openweb reboot – using the best of what came before, leaving the centralised ownership model behind, and building the next layer around federation, trust, participation and the commons.

#OMN #Web15 #openweb #4opens #FOSS #commons #fediverse #KISS #geekproblem #dotcons

To compost the #dotcons, the #openweb needs more people with shovels

Yes, the #web02 revolution was a con, it always was. The problem is now most people have spent years pretending that the dominant technology companies were somehow neutral actors – clever companies making useful tools, occasionally getting a little too powerful, occasionally needing a bit of regulation. But now this comforting chattering class story is harder to maintain, as the long “invisible” problem has finally reached the #mainstream, the act of stepping over the smoke and mirrors can now be seen in books such as Gil Durán – that the Silicon Valley billionaire class has developed an explicitly anti-democratic political worldview, and it has accumulated enough money, technology and institutional influence to start acting on it.

The book Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy describes a political culture that did not suddenly appear with Trump. It has roots going back decades: hostility to government, hostility to taxation, extreme individualism, the fantasy of “exit”, private jurisdictions, network states, crypto-utopianism and the idea that technological elitists should be able to operate outside democratic constraints. This view of #geekpoblem history matters because if we treat what is happening now as simply another Trump-era political crisis, we shovel the wrong shit onto the compost heap.

This mess we need to compost is the blinded politics of our technology classes. The con was always bigger than the platform, #dotcons were never simply websites, there “value” comes from when they became infrastructure for social life. #Failbook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, X and the rest were built to control people, they “business modal” inserted themselves between people and their ability to communicate, organise, publish, buy, work and increasingly understand the world.

The con, the clever trick was that they appeared to be giving us something, free publishing, free communication, free social networks, search, storage and entertainment. But the real business model was the capture of the flows, our relationships became data, our attention a commodity, communities became markets, conversations became #LLM training material. Now that our social lives are increasingly controlled as behavioural prediction systems, and the more dependent we became, the more control and thus power accumulated on the other side of the interface.

This is why calling the #dotcons simply “social media companies” is too small a description. They became private governance systems, to make rules, decide visibility and control infrastructure. They moderate speech, shape markets, influence elections. They lobby governments to corrupt political control. And now some of the #nastfew openly talk about replacing democratic institutions with technological and corporate control. The con was never about advertising, it was about power.

Seeing the path underneath the technology is of the useful things, connecting today’s behaviour with 20th century ideas. The Silicon Valley ideology did not begin with artificial intelligence, it developed through decades of worshipping the #deathcult of libertarian and anti-government thinking. Books such as The Sovereign Individual became influential within the elitist chatting classes. Figures such as Peter Thiel pushed ideas, and funding at technology, sovereignty, crypto, private jurisdictions and “exit”.

The basic #nastyfew fantasy is consistent – when the government gets in the way, leave, if democracy is inefficient, replace it. When taxation is inconvenient, move somewhere else. If regulation applies to everyone, build somewhere it doesn’t. If nation states are obsolete, create new digital or corporate forms of sovereignty. It sounds futuristic, but underneath the science-fiction language is something ancient. A #nastyfew group of extremely wealthy people deciding that ordinary democratic accountability should no longer apply to them. This is simply oligarchy updated with #postmodern branding, and then came the #AI boom, that accelerates and intensified the #techshit class mess.

We should not need to talk about how the technology itself is not the enemy, the current #openweb reboot clearly shows it is not. So what is, a very normal story, the worship of the #deathcult, our political and economic structure around the #dotcons, and the #geekproblem that breeds this is the problem.

With #climatechaos visible all around us, we are still being told that all this #techshit is necessary because someone in Silicon Valley has decided that the future requires it. This now easy to see mess is why resistance to data centres, surveillance systems, crypto schemes and companies such as Palantir can become broader than narrow traditional left politics. People are now starting to experience #nastyfew billionaire power physically in the growing social mess. The abstract becomes concrete, the cloud a building, the algorithm becomes distracting fluff, the #dotcons platforms are revealed as workplaces when the billionaire becomes the person deciding what happens in your town.

The #OMN more profound question is increasingly about who gets to control infrastructure and who gets to participate in deciding how it is used. That is a democratic question, and it should also be a #openweb question. This is where the current reboot comes in to balance the mess. The #NGO, civil society answer cannot simply be to keep regulating the #dotcons harder while continuing to depend on them for everything. Yes, regulation matters, taxation matters, breaking up monopolies matters and basic democratic accountability matters.

But we also need alternatives; otherwise we remain trapped inside #nastfew controlled infrastructure. This balancing is why we can’t keep fucking up our #openweb reboot. We need to #KISS take the useful lessons from the early web – openness, decentralisation, interoperability, user control and federation – and combine them with the better UX lessons we learned from Web 2.0.

We need to build this alt path on the current #Fediverse, based on exiting reboot #4opens paths like #ActivityPub and #RSS. What we don’t need is more of what current takes the vast majority of #openweb funding and coding focus. Not another collection of #VC startups, any more “ethical” billionaire-funded platforms – not another centralised service waiting to become the next #dotcons.

We need something structurally different, we need practical shovels to composting the #dotcons. This is where I use the word compost deliberately, we cannot simply pretend the last 30 years didn’t happen, there is an enormous pile of #techshit. Some of it is bad technology, much is bad governance. Some is exploitative economics, surveillance, addiction. In our heads we need to compost venture-capital paths, empty innovation language and the stink of #NGO and institutional capture.

Some of the simple #geekproblem is just plain bad social thinking dressed up as technical expertise. But there is likely useful material in the pile too, the #web02 #dotcons did teach us things – They showed us that people want easy-to-use communication tools – the importance of good #UX, we need to take what is useful and use this to expose what is toxic. To understand how it happened, learn from the failures. Then we need to translate this understanding into action to break the concentrations of power, to open space to grow something different.

The #geekproblem is part of this, another uncomfortable layer. The alternative technology world has not always been good at avoiding the same mistakes, the #geekproblem is real. Too often we build technology according to what technically clever people think is interesting rather than what communities actually need. We confuse technical complexity with progress, confuse innovation with usefulness, technical decentralisation with democracy. And often we recreate the same power structures inside #FOSS that we were supposedly trying to escape.

The resulting technically elegant social mess, is a strange imitation of the #dotcons: technically open underneath, but socially closed around the people who understand the machinery. This mess is then feed into the funding problem, where the #fashernistas enter the pile.

With the current #openweb reboot, alternative technology is increasingly surrounded by funding ecosystems that reward fashionable language, impressive demos, grant-friendly projects and institutional credibility. The grassroots people actually doing the work can become secondary, the people who understand the community get pushed aside by people who understand the funding application. The messy project gets replaced by the polished project, the difficult social question becomes a technical deliverable, and the result is another layer of #techshit.

This is not inevitable, but we need an open process capable of exposing it, that is the reason the #4opens matters – Open data – Open source – Open standards – Open process. The fourth one is particularly important, if the process is visible, we can see who is making decisions, how money is moving, whose ideas are being prioritised and where the projects are about grafting. We can challenge it before the pile gets too big, we need to compost the #techshit at source.

To grow anything in the current mess, we need infrastructure that ordinary communities can understand, use, modify, share and govern. We need technology that supports participation rather than extracting it, systems where disagreement, correction, rollback and learning are normal. We need tools that help communities build memory rather than constantly throwing yesterday into the algorithmic landfill.

So we know what we need, we know what we need to compost. The chattering classes are finally waking up, we have the interesting thing, that some of the people who have spent years talking about “innovation” and “the future” are finally starting to notice what has been happening. The warning signs are no longer hidden, #nastyfew political power is visible as is the social and ecological damage.

The question is no longer whether there is a problem, it is becoming what we do about it. And this is where I worry about the next stage because every time the mainstream finally notices a grassroots problem, the #fashernistas arrive. They package it, brand it, secure the funding to create the conference to build their careers. This simply “common sense” behaver stinks and is going to kill and displace billions of people.

And somehow, after all that activity, the people who were actually doing the work are still standing outside the room, we have seen this cycle for decades, we cannot afford to repeat it here. So shovel harder, the #openweb reboot has a job to do, we don’t have the time to create another fashionable technological sector. We don’t need another class of sellout experts to compete to become another set of gatekeepers. And definitely not to reproduce the #dotcons with a nicer logo and some open-source code.

We need to shovel hard, turn over the #dotcons, expose the blinded ideology, compost the bad economics, the #geekproblem and the corrupt grant culture. We need to compost our own #fashernista performance. To balance this we have to keep the useful technology, the useful knowledge, the communities and most importantly keep the history. Then use all of that compost to grow something genuinely different.

The old web was open enough to give us a glimpse of what was possible, #web02 captured that openness and turned it into private infrastructure. Now we have a chance to take the useful parts back, not by going backwards, but by putting people and communities back into the centre of the flow.

The #deathcult worshippers have spent decades building an escape route from simple democratic accountability. Our path is not to follow them on this fantasy, it is rather to build a better path in the other direction. The #dotcons are a huge pile of compost, the question is whether we are willing to pick up the shovels.

#NLnet we are still waiting for an opportunity

#NLnet is the BEST of the terrible #openweb tech funding in Europe, likely the world. Over the last 10 years we’ve put around a dozen funding applications in to #openweb funders with real-world social and technological value projects. All were dismissed at the first round.

So this time we brought in a professional fundraiser to help write the application. They did an impressive job, and finally, our #OMN #makinghistory proposal – Trust-Based Media Flows for the #Fediverse – made it through to the second round.

Today, people have started publishing updates on getting grants, nothing back for us yet. The second-round process appears to involve “a polite interrogation: what are the ideas, how will the project be developed, what will the money pay for, what are the main tasks, and what is the project’s policy on AI-assisted coding? All perfectly reasonable questions”, that we are still waiting to have an opportunity to address.

There is a bigger problem, progressive tech funding still has a narrow idea of what counts as valuable #openweb work. Projects have to translate themselves into the language of funders, technical reviewers and the #geekproblem before they can even get considered. Grassroots projects are expected to prove their legitimacy through carefully packaged technical language.

Meanwhile, the things we are actually trying to build – trust, federation, community infrastructure, open process, human moderation, archives and alternative media flows – are the things that don’t fit neatly into the usual technology funding boxes.

So yes, we’re patiently waiting to see what happens with #NLnet, and are grateful that the project reached the second round. But getting through one funding round shouldn’t feel like winning a lottery. If the #openweb is supposed to be commons, funding it needs to be about more than finding projects that already know how to speak the language of institutions and narrow #geekproblem subcultures.

The #OMN path is about building infrastructure with and for the people doing the work, that probably means we will always be slightly awkward applicants. Good, the #openweb needs more awkward projects and fewer polished funding bubbles.

#4opens #OMN #openweb #FOSS #Fediverse #techchurn

Who’s Building the #Openweb – and Who’s Just Feeding Off It

This is the Web 1.5

This is the web 1.5 idea, with the #OMN people ask whether this is just rebuilding Web 2.0, the answer should be no. We are trying to undo some of the damage Web 2.0 did to Web 1.0 while keeping the useful things we learned from it.

Web 1.0 openness.
Web 2.0 UX.
Fediverse federation.
#4opens process.
Community trust.
News and archives first.
Governance further down the road.

That is the rough shape of Web 1.5, it isn’t about making another giant platform, it is building infrastructure where media objects can flow between communities, where history can be preserved without everything being privately owned, and where social intelligence isn’t replaced by a central algorithm. The mess we’ve inherited is real, but perhaps we don’t need to clean it all up before we can build something new, we can compost it.

So, let’s dive a bit deeper into this, how is #OMN different from Web 2.0? The short answer is, it isn’t trying to rebuild Web 2.0. It is trying to recover what Web 1.0 got right, while keeping the useful UX lessons of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 took much of the openness of Web 1.0, wrapped it in better UX, and then turned it into the #dotcons – centralised, privatised platforms that captured and monetised the value of the #openweb.

#OMN takes a different path – the basic idea flows rather than ownership. Instead of everything being centred on individual accounts, owned databases and personal content silos, media objects can flow between trusted nodes. Media comes in, are curated and grouped into Stories, and those Stories then flow back into the network as new media objects. That makes #OMN feel like Web 1.5, it keeps the Web 1.0 openness, decentralisation and interoperability, but adds some of the better usability lessons from Web 2.0. The difference is that we’re not bringing back the centralised ownership model.

In #OMN, an instance isn’t primarily a collection of individual social-media accounts. It is more like a node in a shared media flow, providing curation through media objects and collective Stories. Users can still exist in the underlying software, it’s a balance, but they don’t need to be pushed to the surface as the centre of the #OMN network. This also changes how we think about participation. You don’t necessarily have to “own” the media to participate in it. You can contribute, curate, tag, connect, remix, archive and pass things on. As we put it – less ownership, more participation, more flow, more commons.

The aim is also to get away from the popularity contests of social media. Objects move through the federation towards the nodes and communities where they have value. Things that aren’t useful don’t necessarily need to be centrally deleted, the network can be deliberately lossy, allowing some things to fade while other things are carried forward. Though instances can choose to save everything if they can scale this, even apparently useless material might become useful as compost for future work.

And importantly, #OMN is not social media, it is about news and archiving, with governance further down the road. It works alongside social media rather than trying to become another social-media platform.

The bigger idea is that we shouldn’t have to choose between the open but sometimes awkward Web 1.0 and the polished but enclosed Web 2.0. Like the #Fediverse we balance the best of both, Web 1.0 openness + Web 2.0 UX + today’s federated infrastructure = Web 1.5. Not a return to the past, not another #dotcon. A reboot of the #openweb, using what we have learned since.

#MakingHistory #OMN #openweb #4opens #Fediverse #FOSS #Web1 #Indymediaback #commons #OGB

UPDATE01: OK for #web1.5 am going to use #web15 as the point breaks the hashtag #KISS

UPDATE02: why is this important? It’s simple, participation rather than passive consumption is a cultural problem. The #dotcons trained people to become consumers – Scroll. Like. Share. Repeat – The #openweb needs a different relationship.

To move past this current mess, let’s look how the #OMN changes this, you might start by simply reading, then you learn how the system works. Eventually, you contribute something to become part of the production process rather than remaining a consumer at the end of it.

The aim is to lower the barriers between producer and consumer. This doesn’t mean everybody has to become a journalist or programmer. It means creating systems where participation is possible and meaningful.

The expertise problem

Technical expertise matters, the problem begins when technical expertise is treated as the only legitimate way of understanding a social problem. This is the trap of technocracy: taking a useful tool for understanding parts of the world and turning it into a complete worldview. The expertise problem “We need more technical expertise in government.” But that is half the answer. The mistake is to jump from “politicians need technical expertise” to “technical experts should make decisions.” That replaces one form of stupidity with another.

A functioning society needs engineers, scientists, programmers and researchers. But it also needs historians, sociologists, artists, carers, journalists, workers, communities and ordinary users Technical knowledge is one tool in a toolbox, it is not the toolbox.

We have seen the consequences repeatedly. Politicians who barely understand how the internet works are expected to regulate it. At the same time, technology companies and technical communities assume that because they understand the machinery, they therefore understand the society surrounding it. Neither position is good enough – we need technical people involved in politics and governance, but we also need those technical people to understand that engineering is not governance.

The #geekproblem hashtag is particularly important part of the story for the #openweb. A lot of contemporary technology culture has inherited a blinded belief that social problems can be converted into technical problems: if something is messy, build a perfect system, when people disagree, write a protocol, when something is unsafe, add security. If information is difficult to manage, build an algorithm, when people behave badly, moderate them automatically. If a community is struggling, optimise the workflow. Sometimes these things are useful, but often the “technical solution” simply hides the social problem.

The problem isn’t that geeks are bad people. It is that technical culture can become too comfortable with abstraction. People become numbers, communities datasets, politics optimisation. Relationships become networks, trust becomes authentication and participation becomes a user interface. And suddenly, we have designed a technically elegant system that nobody actually wants to live inside.

This is the deeper danger of #technocracy, it is not simply about having too many computers, engineers or technical experts. It is about turning technical expertise into political authority. The idea has been around for a long time. During the crisis of the 1930s, technocratic movements argued that society could be managed by scientific and technical experts rather than through the messy processes of democratic politics. The appeal was understandable: when society is in crisis, efficiency, certainty and expertise can look much more attractive than disagreement, compromise and uncertainty.

But that is the problem – democracy is messy because society is messy. There is no technical system that can contain all the values, histories, relationships, conflicts and experiences of the people affected by a decision. The belief that a small group of people with enough information can simply calculate the correct answer is not an escape from politics, it is politics disguised as engineering.

We can see the same problem emerging in our own technology culture. Silicon Valley has presented itself as being above politics: just build the system, scale it and let the technology solve the problem. But these companies have accumulated enormous economic and political power precisely because their systems shape how people communicate, work, organise, consume information and understand the world. Technology is therefore not neutral infrastructure, who owns it matters – who controls it matters – who funds it matters – who writes the rules matters – who has the power to change those rules matters. And what happens when the system is wrong matters.

The danger becomes serious when technological power and political power start merging. A technology billionaire does not become democratically accountable simply because their company operates critical infrastructure. A powerful algorithm does not become legitimate because it is technically sophisticated. A government does not become more democratic because it uses AI. Technology can be used to amplifie power without making that power accountable.

Technologies of humility

This is where the idea of technologies of humility becomes useful: technical and policy systems need to take uncertainty, ambiguity, vulnerability and the limits of knowledge seriously. Four principles might be useful.

Framing

How are we defining the problem? Are we actually addressing the problem, or simply addressing the part that is easiest to measure? This is hugely important in #OMN development, if we define the problem as “How do we distribute content efficiently?” we will build one kind of system. If we define it as “How do communities maintain trustworthy shared media and social memory?” we build something very different. The technical architecture follows the social framing.

Vulnerability

Who gets hurt by the solution? A system can be efficient and still be destructive. Algorithms can optimise engagement while making people miserable. A moderation system can reduce abuse while silencing marginalised voices. A security system can protect one group while excluding another. We need to ask: who is missing from the path?

Distribution

Who gets the benefits? Who gets the power, the money and who carries the risks? This is one of the most important questions in technology because “innovation” is rarely distributed equally. The #dotcons have become good at extracting value from social relationships while presenting the resulting technology as neutral infrastructure, it isn’t neutral. The ownership model matters, governance matters. The #4opens matters because it tries to move these questions into the open.

Learning

What happens when we are wrong? This may be the most important principle of all, there is rarely one perfect answer to a complex social problem. We need systems that can learn, not simply systems that can scale. This is one of the reasons #OMN is interested in things like moderation, rollback, metadata, federation and open governance. A social system needs mechanisms for correction, needs to be possible to say “That didn’t work. Let’s change it.” without treating the previous decision as sacred.

We need to understand that open systems need more than code, you can have beautifully engineered open-source software running a terrible social system, a decentralised network full of authoritarian communities, transparent code supporting opaque power, and you can build technically open systems that are socially closed.

So the challenge isn’t simply – how do we make the technology open? It is, how do we make technology part of an open social process? That is a much harder question, and much more interesting and why #OMN is deliberately messy.

The #OMN approach isn’t to pretend that we can design the perfect social system in advance. It is to build enough open infrastructure for communities to experiment, disagree, adapt and learn. That means accepting that different communities will do things differently, while providing common building blocks that allow different paths to develop – different interfaces, different workflows, different communities and different forms of participation. It means designing for disagreement rather than pretending disagreement can be engineered away, a path from technical systems to social infrastructure.

Composting the current mess is where the critique of tech authoritarianism connects directly to the #geekproblem, it is the problem of expertise becoming authority without accountability. And the answer is not to remove technical people from decision-making. Quite the opposite. We need their knowledge. But we need it alongside other forms of knowledge and inside democratic, open and accountable processes.

Engineers can tell us what a system can do, but they cannot, by themselves, tell us what society should want. Programmers can design protocols, but they cannot decide what relationships a community should have. Data scientists can identify patterns, they cannot determine what those patterns mean to the people living through them. And AI can process enormous quantities of information, it still cannot replace human judgement, lived experience, disagreement and democratic legitimacy.

This is why #4opens + #OGB + #OMN + #MakingHistory belong together, attempts to build technical infrastructure that leaves room for social intelligence rather than replacing it. To repeat endlessly the path is not one perfect platform, one perfect algorithm or one perfect governance model, #KISS we need more tools, not one answer.

On this native path, mess is not necessarily a failure, it can be the space where learning, disagreement, adaptation and democracy actually happen. That is a much humbler – and potentially much more powerful – ambition.

#OMN #openweb #4opens #OGB #MakingHistory #FOSS #geekproblem #technocracy #technology #governance #commons #socialmedia #decentralisation